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On the other hand, they can land planes, write news stories, and emotional robots may be your very best friend or your loyal pet.

“Hello, I’m your server Xiaolan (left) and this is my assistant Xiaotao. Can we get you a drink?” The conversation is imagined. The restaurant, where these two food-delivering robots work, is real and located in Zhejiang province, China.

By Simon Worrall,

National Geographic

JUNE 03, 2015

From the invention of the steam engine to the Internet, technology has helped drive human progress. But Martin Ford, author of Rise Of The Robots: Technology and The Threat Of A Jobless Future, suggests we are now at a tipping point where robotics, if not handled right, may trigger mass unemployment and economic collapse.Talking from his office in Sunnyvale, California, he explains how 3-D printing may revolutionize the construction industry; why the Japanese like having robots as pets; and how robots may make it even harder to halt climate change.

Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking said that “artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Surely, this is sci-fi?

I’d agree, that’s definitely science fiction. Some very smart, high profile people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned about this. In the very long term they may have a point. But, based on what I know from talking to people who are actually working in artificial intelligence (AI), we are not anywhere close to that.

An Oxford University survey suggested that 47 per cent of the world’s jobs will be taken by robots in the coming decades. What’s involved and which jobs are most at risk?

This is a big issue that is not science fiction and is happening already. It involves what we call narrow artificial intelligence, which can do relatively routine, predictable things. By predictable, I mean you can predict what a person doing a job is going to be doing based on that they’ve done in the past.

Some of the people most threatened are what we might call office drones: people who sit in front of computers doing relatively routine, formulaic things.

Like flipping burgers?

It could be flipping burgers or a lot of factory and warehouse jobs like stocking shelves. One of the most dramatic impacts isn’t going to involve actual robots. It’s going to involve software. Some of the people most threatened are what we might call office drones: people who sit in front of computers doing relatively routine, formulaic things. If your job is to produce the same kinds of reports again and again, software is getting smarter and better at doing that. We already have lots of examples, even in journalism. There’s smart software that is able to write basic news stories. Lots of white-collar jobs held by college graduates are going to be threatened.

What will the effect on the world economy be?

In the long run, it could have a dramatic impact and I think we are already beginning to see that. As you eliminate workers and people become unemployed or their wages fall, consumers will have less purchasing power to buy the products and services produced by the economy. As a result, there will be less and less demand. Economists all over the world are talking about this issue. In Europe, for example, there are concerns about inflation because there is not enough demand for products and services. If you project this forward, there are going to be a lot of people who are either unemployed, underemployed, or struggling financially, who simply won’t have discretionary income to spend.

How does your work in Silicon Valley inform your writing about robots. Was there an ‘Aha’ moment?

I got my start here in the early 1990s, when I founded a small software company in my home. This was the era when Microsoft Windows was just becoming important. Software was a pretty labor-intensive business to run. We would ship our software on CD ROMs, with a printed manual. All of that had to be manufactured and then physically shipped to the customer. As my business grew, I ended up outsourcing that to another little company in Berkeley, California, which hired people from different backgrounds. But within a few years, that company went out of business. Now, software is either shipped directly over the Internet or it’s hosted in the cloud. It had a dramatic impact on small businesses in terms of jobs. And that’s what started me thinking about this issue.

Off-shoring jobs to China and other places has been going on for decades. How will it potentially connect with artificial intelligence?

Off-shoring is the intersection of globalization and technology. What we’re seeing now is that as automation gets better, a lot of jobs that were once off-shored to low wage countries, especially in areas of repetitive customer service, are being replaced by things like digital voice systems.

Scientists in Japan have programmed a robot to help an elderly person out of bed and into a wheelchair.

PHOTOGRAPH BY RANDY OLSON, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

As a result, a lot of those jobs may evaporate in the Third World. Countries like India will also try to climb up the skills ladder and go after much higher value type professional jobs. You could take a young, relatively inexperienced, but very smart worker in India or China and combine them with these very powerful artificial intelligence-enabled tools; and together they would be able to compete with a much more experienced worker in the US.

Qualities like judgement and experience, which we associate with people, are more and more being encapsulated into artificial intelligence and algorithmic approaches. In many cases, they’re doing it better [than humans].

There already have been isolated cases, typically in Japan, where people have developed very close relationships with robots.

The movie, Her, with Scarlett Johanssen imagined a future where we even have emotional relationships with AI companions. Is that possible?

Absolutely. There’s already research into building emotional robots and many people predict that companion robots and robots that provide sex and things like that are not too far in the future. There already have been isolated cases, typically in Japan, where people have developed very close relationships with robots. Many people here see robots as threatening, as in the Terminator movies. In Japan, robots are perceived much more positively. They’re much more likely, for example, to be used as pets.

A neuroscientist I interviewed for Book Talk told me that, for the foreseeable future, AI would be good for “cleaning toilets”, but not much else. Is he wrong?

I think he’s got it backwards. To build a robot that can clean toilets or do the things a housekeeper might do is a tremendous technical challenge. To build a software system that can automate a job held by someone with a college degree is much easier. Robots can already do all kinds of remarkable things, like land airplanes or trade on Wall Street. It’s certainly way beyond cleaning toilets.

WATCH: Robotics expert and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Chad Jenkins says that coming breakthroughs in robotics will soon make robots a bigger part of everyday life.

3-D printers can now create human organs. In what other fields may they reshape the future?

3-D printing is primarily applicable in areas where you want customization. One of the areas that has dramatic potential to be transformative is in construction, when you take the idea of a 3-D venture and scale it up so it becomes this huge, construction-level machine. That would enable us to very rapidly construct houses and other buildings in an almost completely automated fashion. It would also potentially threaten millions of construction jobs.

Surely, total automation is a good thing; Karl Marx said, people will have more free time, which will “redound to the benefit of emancipated labor.” He’s right, isn’t he?

There are two ways this can go. The idea that robots are going to take over all the unpleasant work is pretty attractive. The problem is distributional. In the world that exists today and has always existed, jobs and incomes are coupled together. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have an income. It could be a utopian outcome if you had an income independently from a job. You wouldn’t have to work at something you didn’t enjoy, but you would still have income to participate in the economy and help drive economic growth and all those things that we need people to do.

In the near term, I’m a pessimist. In the long term, an optimist. I’m a strong believer in technology.

A wolf and a Maltese check out the competition—robot dog named Aibo in Heber City, Utah. Batteries not included. On the other hand, no pooper scooper required.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in today. Right now if you don’t have a job and you don’t have an income, you’ll soon be homeless and living on the street, at least in the U.S. where our social safety net is not at the level of other industrialized countries. That’s the real problem. How do we decouple work from income? I think that’s ultimately what we are going to have to. It’s very simple to say that. But, politically, it’s extraordinarily difficult to make that happen.

A guaranteed income for all citizens, regardless of whether they work, sounds like universal, socialist welfare, doesn’t it?

It will sound like that to a lot of people. But, if you look at the history of that idea, a guaranteed income was supported by some iconic figures on the conservative side, like Frederick Hayek. True socialism means the government taking over the means of production and nationalizing businesses. That’s one path we can take, but I think it would be a very bad outcome. The alternative is a more free market approach, which would give everyone a minimal income so that they have the means to go out in the market and participate. If they need housing, they’ll go and look for housing in the private market and they’ll have the money to spend on it.

How does the rise of robots connect with other challenges we face, like climate change?

I’ll be watching you: In Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a solar powered traffic robot can videotape infractions.

KINSHASA'S SOLARPOWERED TRAFFIC ROBOT CAN VIDEOTAPE INFRACTIONS.

Climate change is a huge challenge and politically we’re having a difficult time solving it. A lot of people don’t believe in it or give it priority, because they’re more concerned with economic issues. When people are worried about paying their rent or putting food on the table, it’s hard for them to focus on something that’s going to impact them decades from now. This is especially true in poor countries. People in those countries are the ones that are going to suffer the most from climate change, but they don’t have the ability to worry about it because they’re focused on surviving economically.

The trend toward automation will make people even more economically insecure, which will in turn make it harder, politically, to make anything happen on climate change. Industries opposed to policies that could address climate change will just say, “If you do this we’re going to lose even more jobs.” And that’s going to kill it. These two things are going to unfold roughly in parallel and they could create a perfect storm where increased unemployment and the impact from automation will make it even harder to address climate change.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the future?

In the near term, I’m a pessimist. In the long term, an optimist. I’m a strong believer in technology. My whole career has been in technology. So, I’m definitely not someone who wants to shut down technology or limit it in some way. I think that would be a terrible idea.

We’re dramatically better off than we were 100 years ago and that’s largely because of technology. The problem is that things are becoming less simple than they were. Technology has reached what you might call “an inflection point.” On the one hand, technology is giving us all this great stuff, like medical discoveries or free information on the Internet. At the same time, technology may take away access to the basics, like a house and food. The extreme example of that is the homeless person who has a smart phone and can go to Starbucks and access all the digital abundance that is out there but has nowhere to live.

If we can address these issues, so everyone has access to a reasonable standard of living while enjoying the fruits of technology, we could have a very optimistic, almost utopian, future. If we don’t, for lots of people who are not economically at the top, it’s going to be pretty dystopian. Many people may lose their anchor to the middle class and get into trouble in terms of the necessities of life.

If you know me or follow my articles you will know that for many years I have been warning about disruptive technologies, the 4th industrial revolution and the impact they will have on the world around us. Disruptive technologies and the necessity for people to enhance their skill sets and evolve to a technical/creative frame of mind and way of life is one of the very reasons I created the TechBubble blog. For many years I have watched the gap between the general public and technology increase, and this is a very dangerous situation for the world to be in.

When I speak to people about this subject, most will shrug it off and think that it does not affect them, but this is so far from the truth. Despite my love for technology, I also see the dangers that the majority of people do not see, or choose to ignore. Myself and many others around the world are trying to help people to understand the importance of having a plan for what lies ahead. It literally is a case of survival, learn new skill sets or be pushed into poverty, like it or not these are the choices the world has to face.

Since I wrote that article nothing has changed regards to the effects of disruptive technologies, other than it is almost make or break time and still people seem to be totally oblivious to the dangers that lie ahead of them.

The following section of this article will probably upset a few people, but that is not the intention. As with all of my articles the aim is to help people become more aware of what is going on around them and try to trigger them into thinking about the importance of learning new skill sets and adapting. For many the learning curve is steep, which is why it is so important to start thinking about solutions now. The impact of this revolution already is affecting nearly every person that is going to read this article including myself.

Following are just some of the main industries and job roles that have been, and will suffer greatly over the following years, relating to employment. In truth for me to start writing about every single job that is going to be endangered would lead to a very long article, in short, no one is safe. I will try to focus on the more well known industries, these are not in any particular order...

The Media:

The media is the most obvious place to start. Over the last few years with the growth of online blogs, newspapers around the world have been witnessing a massive decline in sales. People no longer need to buy newspapers or even pay to subscribe to online publications or pay for advertising. Information and advertising is freely available from the millions of online blogs and the various social platforms. Just like it was with newspapers, people are learning which ones to trust and which ones not to. With the steady growth of Artificial Intelligence, newspapers will soon be a thing of the past. Already we have quite advanced A.I programs that scour the web looking for relevant information to report, modern media companies don't actually have to do anything to run a successful media outlet online, they just sit back and let the software do it, regular newspapers will soon not be able to compete with this.

Recruitment Agencies:

With the birth of platforms such as Linkedin, the requirement to hire recruitment agencies has been rapidly declining. There is no longer a need to hire companies to find that perfect member of staff, all you need to do is visit sites like LinkedIn or the millions of others dotted around the internet to find a person that is right for your company. With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, the right match for your job vacancy is mathematically calculated for you, and in most cases with little or no cost. As technology advances over the next couple of years this is another area that will be surplus to requirement.

Accountants:

Accounting software has been around for a while, but as technology is advancing the impact that it is happening is easily noticeable. There is no longer any need to hire accountants when you can pay a one off fee, or in some cases nothing, for software that does it for you more accurately than any human could. As with the above mentioned, this is one area that will soon fade away in the not too distant future.

Secretaries and Phone Operators:

Again an area that is already being replaced by software over the last couple of years, also like the above, as A.I continues to grow in strength this will be an area that is totally replaced.There will no longer be a need to hire people to handle the requirements of these job roles.

Travel Agencies:

Another area that has been affected by the introduction of software is the travel industry, people can book their holidays online from many different places, there is no longer any need to go through 3rd party companies and again as A.I advances these automated systems will fully replace the need for human interaction.

Sales Staff / Customer Services/ Administration:

Software has already been eliminating the need for companies to employ staff to act as sales representatives / customer service agents and admin staff. This is yet another area that Artificial Intelligence is and will excel in. One of the unique features of Artificial Intelligence is to recognize patterns that humans can not see or identify. With the advancements in big data A.I programs know/will know everything they need to know to provide people with exactly what they need and want. You can already see this in action on many of todays top social media sites, adverts are shown on your news feeds that most of the time do actually show you adverts for things you are actually interested in. The majority of these are powered by A.I. Over the next few years this area will be another area that will be totally replaced by technology.

Taxi Services:

Already taxi services are feeling the pressure from technology, in fact many companies have shut down as they cannot compete with services like Uber. There is no longer any need for people to answer the phones to book taxis, software is fully capable of handling that task. With the introduction of A.I, robotics and self driving cars there will soon be no need for taxi drivers, in the not too distant future this area will be totally automated.

Postal Services/Delivery Services:

Email has massively reduced the need for people to need to send mail, sorting machines reduced the need to hire humans and with the introduction of drones and robotics this will be another area that will soon be fully automated by technology.

The Medical Industry:

The medical industry has been one of the core industries affected by current advancements in technology and this is not going to slow down. Doctors will be replaced by software and robots that can more accurately diagnose illnesses and prescribe medication, human error will be removed from the equation, unfortunately this industry is going to be affected massively simply due to its size.

Education:

Most education is outdated, the need for modern approaches is an absolute must, when children get into the big wide world for the first time they need to be prepared and technologically minded, something that I am sorry to say, just isn't happening in society. You only need to look at the incident involving Ahmed Mohamed who was arrested for creating a digital clock that teachers thought was a bomb to see that clearly the education system is far from up to date. The education system needs to get up to speed, how can it teach children about the real world if it doesn't even understand it? Computer science, maths, physics and technology in general are the most important subjects that will help the children of tomorrow. One of the main areas that is changing in education is more and more people are turning to online courses and MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) for further education as cheaper alternative and more freedom.

- Libraries and library assistants will be replaced by online services, robotics and A.I.

So what can you do?

The list goes on and on, as I said there really isn't any job or industry that is safe from this revolution, so what can be done? Well honestly it is a bit of a vicious circle. To make businesses future proof and give them a chance of survival, they need to learn how to utilize modern technology to compete with new gen companies. The ones that don't adopt modern technology and methods will simply not be able to compete. As they begin to adopt modern methods, job positions will decrease, so what can the general public do? The general public need to learn new skill sets and start using them to create their own businesses, technological creativity and understanding is the key to survival in the connected era. Parents need to not only understand technology themselves but also to teach their children to be technologically minded and creative, additional education outside of the current education system is a must.

There will still be the need for human interaction, but it will be greatly reduced to a small number of positions. As the old industries die, new ones will be born and with that will come new skill requirements. In a world powered and run by technology, it goes without saying that being technologically minded will ease the transition. Some of the above changes will take place over the next 10-15 years say, but a lot of them will have a more immediate affect, within the next 5 years max.

The importance of learning about security:

Online and offline security is also a massive area that people need to pay attention to, for some reason people think they are immune from being hacked and do not understand even the fundamentals of using technology, including the internet, securely. Businesses seem to think it is ok to not take security into consideration when dealing with customers data. Many websites around the world do not even use SSL encryption for online stores and database connections. These types of businesses are not even taking the minimum precautions to keep your data and online identity safe. People need to understand why this is so much as of a risk and boycott these businesses. Laws need to be put in place that penalize these companies, if you want to deal with people's data you are responsible for keeping it safe, and equally, the general public is responsible for identifying these websites and staying well clear.

What tech companies can do:

One of the most important responsibilities a tech company has is to spread awareness about disruptive technologies and write articles that help people understand the benefits and dangers of them, how to use them to enhance their business/life and how to help people advance their skill sets. Another way tech companies can help is by making modern technology easily accessible. Technology is often thought of as expensive but as a community the reality is that we can offer modern, secure technology at prices that help everyone increase their chance of survival. All in all the current tech community is very consumer friendly but there are still ways that many companies can improve and take a more active role in helping people evolve and survive through this revolution.

Which ever way you look at it, and no matter how much people try to put this to one side, it does not change the fact that this is happening now. Ignoring that this is happening is only leading to higher risk of mass poverty. The 4th industrial revolution is real and we are already in the early days of the revolution. Industries and markets are going to collapse and a new way life will exist. People's skill sets need to change in order to survive, education needs to change, the way people think needs to change. If you don't start thinking about it now what will you do WHEN this happens?

Below is a video from the Summit on the Global Agenda in Abu Dhabi that was held this year and covers many of the subjects I have touched open here and in the past. I hope that people take the time to read this article and check out the video. The following years can be the best years of our lives or the worst. It is up to each person to prepare themselves and their families, so make a start now to make life easier in the not too distant future.

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Indy

Indy

IN A FREQUENTLY cited paper, an Oxford University study estimated the potential automation of about half of all existing jobs by 2033. Meanwhile self-driving vehicles, again thanks to machine learning, have the capability of drastically affecting all economies by eliminating millions of jobs within a short span of time. New jobs are no longer created faster than technology destroys them. A report by the World Economic Forum has estimated that despite the creation of millions of new jobs over the next four years, there will likely be a net loss of 5 million.

All of this is why it’s those most knowledgeable in the AI field who are now actively sounding the horn for basic income. During a panel discussion at the end of 2015 at Singularity University, prominent data scientist Jeremy Howard asked, “Do you want half of people to starve because they literally can’t add economic value, or not?” before going on to suggest, “If the answer is not, then the smartest way to distribute the wealth is by implementing a universal basic income.”

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miki.bg

miki.bg

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment. The experiment created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize.